Tag Archives: ZTE

LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS SHANGHAI: ZTE has unveiled its thinnest Blade series smartphone and introduced its first ‘Smart Home’ gateway at the Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2015.

The 5-inch HD Blade D6 is just 6.95mm thick and weighs 120g. It appears to be a slightly leaner version of the S6 announced in January. The 4G device has an aluminum alloy body and features a quad-core 1.3GHz chipset. It runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop.

The D6 has an 88-degree wide-angle 5 megapixel front facing camera and an ultra-HD 13 megapixel rear camera. It comes in pink, gold, grey and silver and will first be available in Australia, Russia and Japan.

The Smart Home gateway enables users to communicate with home devices ranging from light switches to baby monitors via ZigBee and LTE connections. A mobile application for smartphones and tablets allows quick and easy control over a broad range of smart home devices, covering home management, home security, and health and safety, the company said.

Chinese vendor ZTE added to the hype and complexity around 5G – a mobile standard that has not yet officially been defined – by talking up the concept of ‘pre-5G’ technology.

The company claimed that pre-5G will be available much sooner than 5G, which has a timeframe for commercial launch of beyond 2020. And ZTE believes pre-5G will deliver a comparable user experience to eventual 5G technology, offering high throughput and low latency.

“Even though the industry is still working on 5G standardisation, we already have a lot of clarity on 5G user experience and the 5G candidate technologies,” ZTE’s Xiang Jiying, CTO of wireless, said in a statement today. “Therefore, pre-5G can be defined and implemented even before 5G becomes standardised.”

The executive claimed pre-5G technology will incorporate certain “key” 5G technologies which can be run over existing 4G LTE equipment.

For example, he pushed the idea that Massive MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple Output) has been recognised as a 5G technology, claiming ZTE has been developing pre-commercial Massive MIMO products without the need to modify today’s 4G air interface.

“Thus Massive MIMO has become an important part of pre-5G,” noted ZTE’s statement.

“In addition, ZTE has been investing heavily in 4G vector processing chips for several years, which have an extensible software architecture and strong processing capacity and can meet pre-5G requirements by modifying instruction sets rather than changing the hardware,” it added.